The Apology In Context: Fifty Years of
Catholic-Jewish Kulturkampf

by E. Michael Jones

This article was published
in the May, 2000 issue of Culture Wars magazine. Order

When the people-Israel was locked in its ghettos and the Torah
was its life and holiness its way, they had something to say
to the world. But the world did not ask them. Now the world is
asking. And the question is: does Israel still have the power
to speak? - Samuel F. Dresner

I look forward to saying "Shalom" to you on the
information superhighway! - Alan Dershowitz

That Sam Shapiro would call was not unusual. He calls frequently.
Unusual was the fact that he could not tell me why he called
over the phone. "Read the paper," he kept saying. It
was as if the announcement of a cataclysm of such unimaginable
magnitude could only take place in person. So, after we had returned
from Mass that first Sunday in Lent, he arrived at the door with
the paper in hand which he promptly threw down on the coffee
table as if playing the trump card in a long-running high-stakes
game.

"What do you say to that?" he asked.

The that in question was a article by Knight-Ridder reporter,
David OReilly entitled, "Pope will apologize for Catholics
sins." The future tense in the title was significant even
if its significance was overlooked by Sam in his eagerness to
get a reaction from me.

"Kneeling before the altar of St. Peters Basilica
in the Vatican at a special Day of Pardon Mass,"
OReilly wrote that the pope was "expected to read
a prayer acknowledging the role of Catholics in such horrific
episodes as the Inquisition and the Holocaust, and for such religious
wars as the Crusades, and the conquest of the Americas."
In addition to all that, the Church was also expected to apologize
for the "suppression of scientific knowledge including Gallieos
observation that the Earth revolves around the sun." Rounding
out the Enlightenments wish list of mea culpas, OReilly
asked what Marianne Duddy, executive director of Dignity, the
lobby for Catholic homosexuals, would like to see on the list,
and she responded by opining that the pope "should apologize
for the terrible sense of shame and alienation it
induced in homosexuals by naming them as sinners."

"What do you say to that?" he said again. And then
sensing some hesitation on my part, assuming that not knowing
where to begin meant not knowing what to say, he added, "You
have the right to remain silent."

So I was on trial, and I was on trial because the Church was
on trial, or, more accurately, I was on trial because the Church
was involved in plea bargaining in the court of public opinion
where it had admitted, according to news reports, that it was
guilty, as charged of crimes against humanity. The infamy was
hoping to get by perhaps with a lighter sentence before she was
finally crushed in the court of public opinion by the Enlightenment
press, which functioned in this instance as judge, jury and executioner.

The apology, as one has come to expect in such matters, turned
out to be dramatically different than what got reported in advance
in the papers. Neither the Inquisition nor the Crusades was mentioned
by name, contrary to what OReilly had predicted. Instead,
Cardinal Ratzinger apologized for the "sins committed in
the service of the truth" in the following words:

Let us pray that each one of us, looking to the Lord Jesus,
meek and humble of heart, will recognize that even men of the
Church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used
methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of
defending the truth

The pope responded by asking God to "accept our resolve
to seek and promote truth in the gentleness of charity, in the
firm knowledge that truth can prevail only in virtue of truth
itself."

In a statement released around the same time the apology got
made, Cardinal Ratzinger attempted to defuse some of the criticism
the apology was causing in the press and to clarify some of the
confusion the document was causing among the faithful by claiming
that the apology grew out of the liturgical life of the Church.
"The newspapers speak, and with reason," he said, "of
the 'mea culpa' of the Pope on behalf of the Church, but this
is already done in the prayer that introduces the celebration
of the liturgy every day. The priest, the Pope and the laity,
all... confess before God and in the presence of
brothers and sisters that they have sinned."

Then all but admitting that he knew that the apology would
be used by the enemies of the Church to claim that they had been
right all along, Ratzinger tried to put the apology in its historical
context beginning with the Protestant revolt and the accusations
it leveled against the Church and proceeding up to the Enlightenment,
"from Voltaire to Nietzsche, which sees in the Church the
great evil of humanity that carries all the fault that destroys
progress."

Even granting all that, Ratzinger felt that "we are in
a new situation, in which the Church can confess its sins again
with greater liberty, and thus invite others to confession and
to profound reconciliation. This gives a new humility and new
confidence to confess sins and recognize salvation as a gift
of the Lord."

Although the reports in the Catholic Press made clear that
the "document said the church was holy and cannot sin, but
that its members have sinned through the ages," that distinction
was largely lost on the columnists who wrote about it and saw
in the apology a vindication of their view of the Church as the
root of all evil in an otherwise progressive world.

The document which inspired the liturgical apology, Memory
and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the Past, admitted
in its introductory remarks that "admission of faults committed
by the sons and daughters of the Church may look like acquiescence
in the face of accusations made by those who are prejudicially
hostile to the Church." One priest in Rome expressed similar
misgivings giving his reading of the reaction of the curia to
the apology:

Most of the priests I've spoken to here don't have strong
opinions on the pope's apologies. Most of them concede that a
pontiff has the right to pontificate; and he at least asked forgiveness
for the Church's failures in standing up for life in the womb.
What rankled more were the genuflections by Cardinals Mahony
and Law, which reinforced the widely held idea that the only
way you can sin is to act against the liberal agenda. They both
had laundry lists of political correctitude: women, homosexuals,
Indians, utility infielders, etc. Donna Shalala or Hillary could
have written it for them.

"Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony," according
to a Catholic News Service report of the penance service held
in his archdiocese, "asked forgiveness for any of his own
actions or those of the archdiocese and its Catholics that have
offended or hurt others. He made specific apologies to Jews,
Muslims, women, ethnic and cultural minorities, organized labor,
victims of clergy sex abuse, divorced and remarried Catholics
and women religious. To gay and lesbian Catholics he apologized
for when the Church has appeared to be non -supportive
of their struggles."

Although Ratzingers mea culpa was clear enough, the
response by the pope asking God to "accept our resolve
to seek and promote truth in the gentleness of charity, in the
firm knowledge that truth can prevail only in virtue of truth
itself"was unsettling in its ambiguity. Just what
does it mean to say that the truth can prevail only in virtue
of truth itself? Since there are no footnotes in liturgies, the
serious observer would have to read the apologys preliminary
document by the International Theological Commission, Memory
and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past to
learn that the statement about the truth defending the truth
was taken from Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II document on
religious liberty. Reading through Memory and Reconciliation,
however, especially section 5.3 on "The use of Force in
the Service of the Truth," only adds to the confusion. "Another
sad chapter," we read there,

of the history to which the sons and daughters of the Church
must return with a spirit of repentance is that of the acquiescence
given, especially in certain centuries to intolerance and even
the use of force in the service of the truth." This refers
to all forms of evangelization that employed improper means to
announce the revealed truth or did not include an evangelical
discernment suited to the cultural values of peoples or did not
respect the consciences of the persons to whom the faith was
presented, as well as all forms of force used in the repression
and correction of errors.

According to footnote 78, the internal quotes in the above
quote refer to section 35 of Tertio Millennio Adveniente, but
when we turn to the official Vatican translation of that document,
it condemns not force in service of the truth, but rather "violence
in the service of the truth," a crucial distinction in the
realm of moral theology, since it is clearly licit to use force
to defend the truth. By using the word force instead of violence,
Memory and Reconciliation involves itself in an internal contradiction
as well because in the next section, the one on Christians and
Jews, it goes on to ask forgiveness for Christians who did nothing
to stop the murder of the Jews during World War II. "Did
Christians," it asks, "give every possible assistance
to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted
Jews." If it is wrong to use force in defense of the truth,
then Christians cant be criticized for doing nothing to
save the Jews, because that would have necessarily required the
use of force.

The ambiguous use of "force in defense of the truth"
is finally only resolved by a close reading of Dignitatis Humanae,
from which the quote "that the truth can prevail only in
virtue of the truth itself" is taken. Dignitatis Humanae
makes perfectly clear that this statement refers only to religious
worship and not to either the civil order or the moral order,
both of which demand that force be used to defend the truth.
The context in Dignitatis Humanae makes this clear:

Truth can impose itself on the mind of man only in virtue
of its own truth, which wins over the mind with both gentleness
and power. So while the religious freedom which men demand in
fulfilling her obligations to worship God has to do with freedom
from coercion in civil society, it leaves intact the traditional
Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies
toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ.

If, in other words, the civil authority "presumes to
control or restrict religious activity it must be said to have
exceeded the limits of its power." That use of force would
automatically become a form of violence, which is never licit.
That being said, however, the state "has the right to protect
itself against possible abuses committed in the name of religious
freedom" as well as "the responsibility of providing
such protections . . . for the necessary protection of public
morality. All these matters are basic to the common good and
belong to what is called public order" (#7). If that is
the case, the state would have the right to repulse forced conversions,
which means in a historical context that Christian states would
have the right to prevent Christian from being subjected to forced
conversions to Islam, which would mean, in theory at least, that
the Crusades were justified because their purpose was to prevent
religious coercion.

"It has always remained the teaching of the Church that
no one is to be coerced into believing," Dignitatis Humanae
correctly states, but it has never been the teaching of the Church
that "all forms of force used in the repression and correction
of errors" is wrong, especially since the state, and this
means Christians states as well as the Papal States, had to use
force to preserve both the civil order and the moral order upon
which it is based. To say that the truth has no need of force
to defend it is to deny the reality of sin in history and to
collaborate in the persecution of virtue by sins of omission.
It is also a radically anti-cultural statement because the purpose
of culture is to make the choice of sin difficult and virtue
relatively easy. If the Church were ever to abandon force in
defense of the truth, she would effectively abandon public life
to the libido dominandi of the powerful and unscrupulous. By
eschewing force in defense of the truth, the Church would collaborate
in the exploitation of the weak, whether they be Jews in Nazi
Germany or the unborn in, say, the United States. Taken at face
value, the apology for force in defense of the truth as stated
in Memory and Reconciliation, involves the document in self-contradiction
when it criticizes Christians for not helping Jews.

The liturgical "Confession of Sins against the People
of Israel is relatively unambiguous, when compared to the apology
on sins committed in service of the truth but all the more misinterpreted.
In it Cardinal Cassidy prayed that "Christians will acknowledge
the sins committed by not a few of their number against the people
of the Covenant." The nuance which distinguishes between
the Church which cannot sin and the people in the Church who
sin on a regular basis was lost on Sidney Zion, who nonetheless
praised the pope in his column for New York Daily News. "The
pope," according to Zion, "asked God to forgive the
sins of his church against the Jews." This, of course, is
precisely what the pope did not do. Zions column which
went out of its way to praise Pope John Paul II for the apology
and Pius XII for saving the lives of 860,000 Jews, stopped short
of the reconciliation which Ratzinger had hoped the apology would
inspire. "The only Jews," Zion wrote, "who could
possibly forgive the Church are dead. Some of them have been
dead for 2000 years. It would be chutzpah for Jews today to forgive
the killers, whether they be early Christians or recent Nazis."

So if Cardinal Ratzinger were expecting the Jews to reciprocate
by apologizing for, say, Arnold Rothsteins role in fixing
the 1919 World Series, he was in for a disappointment. The apology
was simply used as one more occasion for scoring points in the
ongoing Jewish-Catholic culture wars of the past 40 years.

"The issue," according to Rabbi James Rudin, ecumenical
officer for the American Jewish Committee "is not what he
pope is going to say, but what its impact will be in, say, Philadelphia:
in the parishes, in seminary training, in the schools, the hymns,
the scriptural readings and homiletics and Good Friday Services."
Like David OReilly, who is quoting him, Rabbi Rudin had
not read the papal apology at the time he made his comments,
but that, of course, did not prevent him from commenting because
the agenda he wanted to apology to foster was already in existence.
In fact, as the revealing reference to Philadelphia indicates,
it has been in existence since the Cultural Revolution of the
60s, when the Jews teamed up with Protestant establishment
to make war on the demographically potent but politically vulnerable
Catholics. The AJC was one of the prime revolutionary organizations
during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and Rudins
comments give some indication that that agenda is still in operation
against, say, Philadelphia and Catholic enclaves throughout the
rest of the country, a battle which I documented in John Cardinal
Krol and the Cultural Revolution.

No one states this more frankly than Leo Pfeffer, who was
a lawyer for a whole host of cultural revolutionary groups including
Rabbi Rudins AJC. Pfeffer described the Cultural Revolution
of the 60s as a conflict between the Catholic Church and
the Enlightenment. According to Pfeffer, the Catholics "hope
for an America in which, if not all will be Catholics, all will
adhere to Catholic values," values which include opposition
to the sexual revolution which was the heart of the Cultural
Revolution: i.e., "no divorce, no contraception, no abortion,
no obscene books or pictures, no homosexuality, everybody worshipping
God in his own way, government solicitous of and helpful to religion,
and children and adults equally obedient to their parents and
lawful authority" (God, Caesar, p. 20).The other side "liberal
Protestants, liberal Jews, and deists [i.e., secular humanists]
," hoped for
a different America: one in which individuals enjoy maximum freedom
of thought and expression, contraception is used and encouraged
to control population and avoid the birth of babies that are
unwanted or cannot adequately be cared for, women's right to
control their own bodies is recognized and respected, the sexual
practices of adults, whether of the same or of different sexes,
are of no concern to anyone but themselves, governmental institutions
avoid manifestations of religiosity, public schools are free
of sectarianism, and citizens are not forced to fight in a war
they deem immoral or in any war. (God, Caesar, p. 20-1)
With the candor of a victor who had nothing more to fear from
his opponents, Pfeffer was never vague about who it was he was
fighting for all those years. For Pfeffer, the enemy was, quite
simply, the Catholic Church. In a memoir which appeared in the
mid-70s (published with mordant irony in the liberal Catholic
magazine Commonweal ), Pfeffer went to some length to explain
his animus against the Catholic Church. "I did not like
it," Pfeffer wrote
because it was monolithic and authoritarian and big and frighteningly
powerful. I was repelled by the idea that any human being could
claim infallibility in any area, much less in the universe of
faith and morals, and repelled even more by the arrogance of
condemning to eternal damnation those who did not believe it.(
Leo Pfeffer,"The Catholic ' Catholic Problem,"
Commonweal, August 1975, pp 302-305.)
The Church which Pfeffer grew up hating (if that is not too strong
a word) was the Church he got to know as a Jewish immigrant in
New York City. During the time Pfeffer was growing up and getting
started in the legal profession, the Catholic Church was, in
his opinion, "one if not the single most powerful political
force in the nation." It was a time, when, to use his own
words,
Pius XI and Pius XII reigned over the Catholic world and Cardinal
Spellman ruled in the United States. It was the pre-John XXIII-Vatican
II era, and it was during this period that my feelings towards
the Catholic Church were formed.
In the Commonweal memoir, Pfeffer refers to his daughter's threat
when she didn't get her way to "marry a Catholic army officer
from Alabama," because that particular configuration of
Catholicism, the military and the South embodied all that Pfeffer
did not like about America. At another point Pfeffer talked about
the impression Catholic schools made on him as a young man:
I often saw children lined up in separate classes as they marched
in. All the children were white; each group was monosexual; all
the boys wore dark blue trousers and white shirts, all the girls
dark blue jumpers and white blouses; all the teachers were white
and wore the same nuns' habits.
Once Pfeffer gets started, the reasons for his animus against
the Catholic Church start to pour forth in an increasingly frank
as well as an increasingly hostile litany of offenses against
the liberal Weltanschauung. Pfeffer did not like the fact that
the Church opposed the Equal Rights Amendment; he is annoyed
that "among the children outside the parochial school on
the way to my office there are only a sprinkling of black faces";
he does not like the fact that the Vatican still defends papal
infallibility and Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical banning
the use of contraceptives; he even opposes the practice of having
first confession before first communion. ("I know it's none
of my business," he adds as if realizing that his animus
is getting out of control even by his own standards, "but
you asked didn't you?") Pfeffer disliked the Church because
of its size and because of its unity and because of its internal
coherence and because of its universality, all of which contributed
to its political power. He disliked it as well because it was,
in his words, "monolithic," because with "monolithity,"
he tells us, "goes authoritarianism."
Pfeffer's animus toward the Church never really changed, but
it did abate somewhat, primarily because the Church's influence
in society had diminished and because the confusion in its own
ranks increasedin no small measure because of Pfeffer's
activities. "What do I think about the Church today?"
Pfeffer asked rhetorically in the mid '70s, "In short, I
still do not like it, but I do not like it less than I did not
like during that period, and the reason is that, while it is
still what it was before, it is considerably less so, if you
can make out what I mean."
We know what you mean, Leo. Pfeffer had beaten the Church in
the cultural revolution of the 60s to the point where it
was a shadow of its former self in terms of political power.
The history of the last 40 years has been the history of increasing
Jewish animus against Catholics, during which the Catholics have
taken a beating defending the moral order. This battle stretches
from the Catholic defeat in defending the Hollywood production
code through the Ginsberg obscenity decision, wherein Philadelphia
handed the pornography industry a defeat it never forgot, through
Lemon v. Kurtzman, all the way to Hitlers Pope and the
most recent academy awards ceremony with teary-eyed tributes
to abortion propaganda and Billy Crystal making jokes about the
pope. All of these battles have one thing in common, they were
part of a struggle between Jews and Catholics over control of
the culture which Catholics have lost on a consistent basis for
going on 40 years now.

Rabbi Samuel Dresner has taken note of this cultural struggle
from the vantage point of a Jew who is outside of the mainstream
of Jewish life, which is to say, from the point of view of a
Jew who still believes in the Torah and the God who is its author.
The results, according to Dresner, have been catastrophic in
terms of the morals of the country. Jews, because they have been
in the forefront of this revolutionary movement, have suffered
disproportional damage to their own family and morals, to the
point where they are now threatened with extinction by the policies
they have foisted on the nation as a whole. In seeing the moral
dimension of the cultural revolution, Dresner differs from a
mainstream Jew like Alan Dershowitz, who according to his own
account, goes to synagogue on the high holydays but cant
make up his mind whether God exists. Dershowitz, who is also
worried that Jews will shrink to a minuscule and insignificant
segment of the American population by 2076, promotes the big
tent theory of Judaism as a way of maximizing its power, something
which causes him problems of definition. A Jew, according to
Dershowitz, is not someone who believes in God; he doesnt
necessarily follow the law in any consistent fashion. He does
not accept the testimony of the prophets. Because he wants to
maximize the number Jews, Dershowitz even rejects the racial
definition of Jew as one born of a Jewish mother. According to
Dershowitz:

In America, and in other nations that separate church from
state, ones Jewishness is a matter of self-definition and
anyone who wants to be considered a Jew or a half Jew, or a partial
Jew or a person of Jewish heritage has a right to be so considered
(Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of
Jewish Identity for the Next Century, p. 324).

So, this means that anyone who defines himself as a Jew is
a Jew, right? Wrong. Lest anyone slip into this view Dershowitz
quickly draws the line: "I do not mean to include former
Jews who practice Christianity," he adds in a footnote.
So according to this view, which was essentially Hitlers
view, a Jew is essentially an anti-Christian who has no core
of beliefs of his own. Sigmund Freud was a Jew in spite of the
fact that he was an atheist, and Edith Stein was not a Jew in
spite of the fact that her mother was a Jew and she worshipped
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and died in a concentration
camp with people who were there because they, like she, were
considered Jews. Dershowitz is clearly uncomfortable with his
position even in the act of stating it because it reduces Judaism
to nothing more than an anti-Christian ideology:

Indeed, for many Jews the only factor that distinguishes Judaism
from Christianity is a negative one: We reject Jesus as the Messiah.
That is why we are so appalled by "Jews for Jesus."
In addition to the often misleading proselytization, they also
shove in our faces the uncomfortable fact that it is only the
rejection of Jesus as Christ that really distinguished most Jews
from mainline Christians. . . . Indeed it is fair to say that
most American Jews, outside of the Orthodox, seem to have more
in common even religiously with mainline Protestants than they
do with the ultra-orthodox Hasidim. (Dershowitz, The Vanishing
American Jew, p. 195).

If, as Dershowitz says, "God is not central to my particular
brand of Jewishness" (p. 180), then what he calls Judaism
is really an ideology whose main tenet is hatred of Jesus Christ.
That Protestant denominations pose no threat to people like Dershowitz
(vide supra) means that his enemy, like Leo Pfeffers, will
be first and foremost the Catholic Church. Since Jews like Dershowitz
do not believe in God, he does not ipso facto believe in the
Mosaic law as authored by God and therefore sacred and binding,
and since he does not believe in the law, his ideology will not
be plagued by scruples about how to deal with his enemies. He
will be, for lack of a better word, a revolutionary, and in Dershowitzs
definition of Judaism as anti-Christian animus we see the basis
for all modern revolutionary groups, something which Rabbi Dresner
has noted.

"American Jews," according to Dresner, "by
and large, have made a caricature out of Judaism, not only by
the vulgarism and crass commercialism that pervade their communal
life, but, more to the point , by too often abdicating the intellectual
life of the faith of Israel to the fads of the time." (Dresner,
Can Families Survive in Pagan America? pp. 190-91). Dresner includes
among these fads "the new politics of communism" just
one of the ideologies which has made Jews "among the chief
advocates of modernity."

Emancipated from their ancient faith by the onslaught of modern
thought, which the antiquated Judaism of the time was ill-prepared
to refute, they transferred their yet unexpended messianic fervor
into the new religion of Marx (Dresner, p. 325).

As the attraction of political revolution faded with things
like Stalins pact with Hitler, the Jews transmuted their
revolutionary fervor into sexual liberation.

An unusually high percentage of the material on sexual liberation
was written by Jews, as well as significant representation among
its advocates. On a more commercial level, for example, Jews
have been strongly represented in Playboy enterprises. Bnai
Briths Anti-Defamation League had no problem, for example,
when some years back they presented their American Freedom Award
at a fashionable black-tie dinner-dance to Hugh Hefner. (Dresner
p. 325).

Dresner notes that the ADL honored Hefner for "a philosophy
of social change." The fact is noteworthy when it comes
to defining mainstream American Jews of the sort Alan Dershowitz
represents, a group whose identity is religious in only the negative
sense, i.e., by rejection of Jesus Christ. Given this raison
dêtre, any "philosophy of social change"
a group like this would espouse would be ipso facto revolutionary.
It would necessarily espouse the overturn of morals as away of
destabilizing the civil order, as a way of taking poltiical control.
This theory of sexual politics, as espoused by Wilhelm Reich,
another secular Jew, is precisely what Hefner embodied in Playboy
magazine, and it is precisely for embodying it that the ADL honored
him.

Sam Shapiro bobs around on this troubled sea of Kulturkampf
like a cork at the Battle of Jutland. Sam was born in 1927 to
a couple which ran a grocery store in the West Bronx and effectively
turned Sam over to his Polish Grandmother to be raised. Since
his grandmother never really mastered English, Sams first
language was Yiddish, something which Sam mastered by reading
Der Vorwartz, especially the advice column known as "the
Bintel Brief," which would comment on concerns of the first
and second generation of Jewish immigrants, things like "My
son is dating a shiksah. What should I do?" As the first
generation died off, the paper's circulation declined. Sam tells
the story of a funeral passing the Vorwartz office in lower Manhattan.
After watching it pass by the window, one
of the reporters turned to the printer and said "Cut the
printing by one!"

Sam eventually got a Ph.D. in history but by the early 60s
his career had stalled. He had been denied tenure at three universities
and after coming back from a year in Castros Cuba and was
faced with the prospect of accepting a one-year appointment or
working as a teacher for the Marxist government of British Guyana,
when he got word that Notre Dame was looking for someone in history.
Having already been turned down by three universities because
of their policy of not hiring Jews, Sam went to the interview
at Notre Dame with some trepidation, wondering why a Catholic
college would be interested in a Jewish history professor. He
soon found out. After being feted for his entire stay, he suddenly
realized at the elaborate dinner they had for him that he was
leaving soon and no one had interviewed him.

Just why Hesburgh wanted to hire Sam became clear when he
was sent almost immediately after arriving as a lowly assistant
professor to the Rockefeller foundation to ask for money. Notre
Dame wanted to show its liberal bona fides by sending a Jew as
its representative. Accompanying Sam was Julian Samora, a recently
minted Ph.D. in Sociology, who got his degree only on the third
try after flunking his prelims twice and only over the protests
of the professors who thought he had flunked them the third time
as well. Notre Dame was heavily into affirmative action, which
was in reality a form of ethnic politics. By sending a Jew to
represent them, they were telling the Rockefellers that they
could be trusted to use their money in a way that would not jeopardize
the interests of the WASP ruling class.

Sam had re-entered my life about a year or so before the popes
apology via another phonecall, which came as out of the blue
as the one this Sunday morning. In the course that conversation,
he announced that when he looked in the mirror he saw "the
face of a dying animal." Sam was 71 years old at the time;
he was being tested for cancer. He thought he was dying. Thoughts
of that sort, as they often do, led to thoughts about the next
life. which led to a contemplation of the four last things: death,
judgment, heaven, hell. Hell was a topic he found especially
intriguing. Sam couldnt believe in the existence of an
actual hell where people suffered the pains of everlasting fire,
but he couldnt reject the idea out of hand either. He was
swept first on way and then another depending on his mood or
his blood sugar levels or what he perceived as the nearness of
eternity. Since he was a retired Notre Dame professor, he had
developed the unfortunate habit over the years of consulting
the Notre Dame theology department whenever he had a question
about the Catholic faith. In the matter of hell, they assured
him that "no one" believed that stuff about "everlasting
fire" anymore, just as years earlier a priest assured him
that Jews didnt need to convert. After taking the priests
advice, Sam then noticed that the priest left the Church to get
married. The simplest solution in this instance would be to accept
Judaism, but Sam couldnt do that either. At one point,
he took me to the local synagogues Bible study class where,
to the embarrassment of most people there, he kept turning the
discussion of Deuteronomy into a discussion of Jesus Christ.
At another point Sam, who was a chess champion in his younger
years, volunteered to teach chess to the children who belonged
to the synagogue, only to have the Rabbi forbid the lesson because
the children were using pencils to write down the chess moves,
something which constituted work on the Sabbath. Sam couldnt
see the point and bid the Rabbi farewell, but he couldnt
bring himself to convert to Catholicism either, although he offered
to take instruction on a number of occasions.

The prospect of Imminent death has a way of clearing the mind.
Our disposition toward the four last things follows from the
decisions we have made in this life. But all of the moral decisions
we make are contextualized by one larger decision about our relationship
to God and the Christ. The question Christ asked of Peter is
the one he asks of us, "Who do you say that I am?"
At the beginning of the third millennium, it is safe to say that
no one gets out of this life without answering that question.
Similarly, no one answers that question with his feet on some
unshakable ground. Everyone attempts to answer that question
while adrift in storms of passion, which find their source in
our own corrupt desires and the devils encouragement. So
if Peter could negate his answer with a denial then its
not surprising that Sam would be swept to and fro on seas of
doubt and passion as well. Once it became apparent that he was
not going to die (at least not within the next few months), his
attitude toward Christ changed. The healthier he got, the more
he talked about evolution. At one typical meeting: he would place
a rock on the table in front of me as if he had just trumped
my ace in a high stakes game and ask, "What is your explanation?"

Needless to say, I have no explanation of rocks. If it wasnt
a rock from Cincinnati, it was the rings around Saturn. "I
guess the heavens proclaim the glory of God," I said. But
that is the wrong answer. The right answer is that evolution
makes God an unnecessary hypothesis. If it wasnt rock from
Cincinnati, it was a copy of Hitlers Pope. If it wasnt
a copy of Hitlers Pope, it was the popes apology.
What do these things have in common? One thing: if the church
is wrong, Sam is right. Sam doesnt have to repent. Sam
will tell God a few jokes when he dies, and he will be admitted
into the place where Paul Kurtz and his followers go after they
die. At some point after the discussion about "everlasting
fire," Sam resolved to enter the Church through the door
known as baptism after considering Pascals wager.

Then he changed his mind. It turns out that he got his prostate
test back, and it turned out that he didnt have cancer
after all. And with that the stakes in the game of salvation
decreased significantly. From being convinced that Pascals
wager wasnt such a bad risk, he went on to being convinced
that he had another 20 years to live. That conviction, strengthened
by attendance at a cheerleading session on atheism led by the
folks at Free Inquiry convinced Sam that religion was an opiate
which he had kicked. The popes apology coming when it did
simply confirmed Sam in feeling that he had made the right decision
in rejecting the Church. After all, why should a Jew join an
anti-Semitic organization? What followed was the same old assault.
On a daily basis, I would have deposited on my desk, more articles
on evolution and more rocks from suburban Cincinnati. Their common
denominator was that the Church was wrong. Coming on the heels
of his class in geology, the apology made Sam feel that he had
just sold his stock before the market crashed.

When I mentioned the fact that the latest version of the missing
link, a creature with a lizards tail and a birds
wings now known as "Piltdown Chicken" after National
Geographic admitted that it had been confected by an enterprising
Chinaman had been exposed as a fraud, it made no impression
on Sam. Hope springs eternal for those who believe in evolution.
Such faith, Christ might exclaim, have I not found in all of
Israel! Ironies, of course, abound here. Evolution was ultimately
used by the WASP establishment as the justification to erect
the immigration laws that kept Jews out of the country in the
period following 1921. Evolution broke the hold that Christianity
had over the mind of the WASP establishment. It shattered their
belief that all men had descended from Adam and were, therefore,
brothers and erected in its place the idea that the newly expelled
Russian Jews were some inferior form of life, an idea which Hitler
acted on in an especially dramatic way after he picked it up
from Madison Grant. That we now have Jews like Sam promoting
evolution is a tribute to our educational systems ability
to socially engineer the people it has under its control.

The deal Sam cut at Notre Dame was emblematic in many ways
of the deal Jews made with the WASP establishment in this country.
The arrangement is fairly straight forward and sketched out in
rough form in Digby Baltzells 1964 book The Protestant
Establishment , the point of which is to urge fellow WASPs to
admit Jews to their exclusive clubs. According to Baltzell,

a crisis in moral authority has developed in modern America
largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant establishments
unwillingness, or inability to share and improve its upper-class
traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished
members of minority groups into its privileged ranks. . . . I
have focused on the problem of anti-Semitism largely because
the present position of the Jews in this country best illustrates
the nature of the conflict between the forces of caste and aristocracy,
which is my central theme (p. x).

Baltzell prefers aristocracy, which is based on merit, over
caste, which is another word for ethnicity, which he associates
with obscurantism, convinced as he is that "these [i.e.,
Whig] traditions are being threatened in our time by the divisive
forces of racial and ethnic prejudice." In The Protestant
Establishment, Baltzell describes a schism in the WASP ruling
class according to which the good guys are represented by Harvard
and the bad guys by exclusive clubs like Union League and the
Links. The good guys, according to Baltzell, are

a small but growing minority of old stock aristocrats, following
the Whig tradition in England, were willing to share their privileges
with distinguished members of minority groups in order to maintain
their traditional power and authority within the ranks of some
sort of new and heterogeneous establishment; they first became
Progressives under Theodore Roosevelt, eventually supported Woodrow
Wilson and finally joined and often led the Democratic Party
during the Great Depression, and many of their sons were inspired
by the aristocratic style of the New Frontier (p. xii).

There is, of course, a downside flowing from this strategy,
especially if it is viewed from the point of view of the ethnic
groups that are getting colonized by it. In Das Kapital, Karl
Marx wrote (and Baltzell quotes him) that "the more a ruling
class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of the dominated
classes, the more stable and dangerous its rule." Following
the same line of thought Paul M. Sweezy, himself a Harvard grad,
criticizes Harvards strategy "as recruiters for the
ruling class, sucking upwards the ablest elements of the lower
classes and thus performing the double function of infusing new
brains into the ruling class and weakening the political leadership
of the working class" (Baltzell, p. 344).

This, of course, is precisely the strategy which Baltzell
is urging the WASP establishment to adopt vis a vis the Jews.
"Today," Baltzell writes, "when our steadily expanding
postwar economy is demanding more and more leaders of ability
and education , regardless of ethnic origins, an upper class
which is still based on the caste criteria of old-stock Protestant
origins is simply an unrepresentative anachronism. (The Protestant
Establishment, p. 19).

But even in urging it, Baltzell really never gets around to
explaining the real downside of the Whig assimilationist paradigm.
The real downside is that assimilation means extinction because
the price of admission into the WASP ruling class is the adoption
of WASP sexual mores, which means the use of contraception and
abortion on their own offspring by the people who wish to assimilate.
Baltzell never mentions the moral degeneracy of the WASP ruling
class in his book, but that and the resultant lack of offspring
is why they had to close this deal with the Jews in the first
place. There simply werent enough Protestants around to
staff the establishment they had created. In order to keep the
empire running, the ruling class in the United States, like the
ruling class in England a century before, had to turn to the
Jews to run it with them and eventually for them. But in order
to be admitted to the ruling class, the Jews had to assimilate,
which meant that they had to adopt the sexual practices of their
betters, which meant in the long run that their short-term success
guaranteed their long-term extinction.

Alan Dershowitz is very aware of the fact that the Jews are
threatened with extinction. His book The Vanishing American Jew
deals precisely with this topic, specifically with the threat
that

Our numbers may soon be reduced to the point where our impact
on American life will necessarily become marginalized. One Harvard
study predicts that if current demographic trends continue, the
American Jewish community is likely to number less than 1 million
and conceivably as few as 10,000 by the time the United States
celebrates its tercentennial in 2076 (The Vanishing American
Jew, p. 2).

Unfortunately Dershowitz can no more look the real cause of
decline in the face than Baltzell can. Dershowitz cant
bring himself to look at the cause because that would call into
question his political identity as a liberal, an ideology which
is based on sexual liberation. So instead of facing the real
issue, Dershowitz tries to find scapegoatsthings like alleged
proselytism of the Religious rightanything it would seem
other than the fact that the Jews contracepted and aborted themselves
out of existence in the interest of short term political power
and wealth. At one point Dershowitz says that "where the
Nazis failed in their nightmarish plan to eliminate Jews as a
potent force in the world, we ourselves may succeed" (p.
24), but he never gets around to mentioning, much less condemning,
the means that made that "success" possible.

Dresner does not mention contraception in his book, but he
does mention the threat which "pagan" sexual mores
pose to the continued existence of Israel:

Caged within ghetto bars for centuries, the Jews emerged into
the freedom of Western society where they drank in its culture,
tasted its pleasure, and enjoyed its power. They demanded citizenship
and were so eager to be accepted by the majority that they often
offered themselves, sacrificed their history, faith and way of
life, their "identity," in order that the stigma of
their difference might be obliterated. The roads they traveled,
the difficulties they met along the way to achieve this goal
have been described in countless records and are embedded in
the memory of almost every Jewish family in the twentieth century
(Dresner, p. 234).

Dresner mentions Woody Allens film Zelig as "a
satire on the absurdity of the lengths to which Jews have gone
to assimilate," but Dresners solution means a return
to the Mosaic law and belief in God, something which Dershowitz
is unwilling to accept. "They," Dresner writes of people
like Dershowitz, "want their children to retain the essence
of Judaism, without necessarily living under its constraints
and burdens" (Dresner, p. 56). Dershowitz at one point cites
historian Geoffrey Barracloughs claim that "demography
is destiny" (Dershowitz, p. 50) but is unable to draw the
obvious conclusion from that remark, namely, that contraception
precipitated the demographic crisis in the WASP ruling class
which brought the Jews to power, and that in order to get to
power they had to adopt the mores which begat that very crisis.

This is a truth which is now slowly dawning on Sam Shapiro.

"Neither of [my] children," he wrote in an e-mail
message which he circulated to friends, " through
no fault of their own  is married, and it seems that the
long, long, long line of Shapiros and Kaufmans may come to an
end with us. Rather sad. My Catholic editor neighbor friend around
the corner is reading Allen Dershowitz' book on The Vanishing
Jews [sic]. Dershowitz says my case is symptomatic, that higher
education, late
marriage, birth control, and intermarriage, will reduce the number
of Jews in
America to less than a million with consequent loss of cultural
and political importance. Well - Gloria and I won't live to see
that

Sam may not see that, but there is every indication that his
childrens generation is upset by the prospect and acting
in a manner different than their parents. The generational split
in the Podhoretz and Kristol clans over support of John McCain
is one indication that the older generations understanding
of itself as a permanent minority is not shared by the younger
generation, which tries to manipulate the media which the Jews
dominate to maximum political effect, with sometimes disastrous
consequences, as McCains neocon inspired attack on Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson showed.

"Many postmodern Jews," Dresner wrote referring
to precisely this generation heading, however in another direction,
"have discovered a puzzling truth: No license has replaced
the Law . . . no Jaguar, a child" (p. 329). Americas
Jews of the modern generation, for the most part, took the Jaguar
instead of the child. The thought occurred to me when Sam arrived
at my office once again, this time to wave his pay stub from
TIAA-CReff. The stock market had made him a millionaire, but
he still didnt have any grandchildren, and, given the ages
of his children, is unlikely ever to get any. When I asked Sam
if he were planning to take it with him, he replied, "Of
course. If I cant, Im not going to go."

Since demography is destiny, the Jews who made that choice
are now faced with the consequences of their actions, and as
a result, many of them are not happy. In Alan Dershowitz we see
the Jewish version of Madison Grant, the man whom Digby Baltzell
as the "ideal defender of a vanishing America." Just
as Grants 1916 magnum opus The Passing of the Great Race
in America, touches on WASP fear about the differential fertility
resulting from the use of contraception which will eventually
lead to the demise of WASP political hegemony in the United States,
so Dershowitz touches on Jewish fears of the same thing. Both
men also attempt to turn what is essentially a moral problem
into a racial problem. Both WASP racism and Jewish racism have
as their unacknowledged common denominator the deliberate repression
of the basic moral truth that both ethnic groups were responsible
for their own demise because of the widespread adoption of contraception.
The same thing can be seen in Malcolm Xs systematic demonizaton
of the white race. In each instance the charismatic ethnic leader
engages in projection of guilt rather than looking the truth
in the face. Instead of acknowledging the moral flaw that lies
at the heart of the demographic problem, Grant and Dershowitz
create racial demons which are to act as scapegoats for the unacknowledged
sexual sins of the ethnic group which brought about its own demographic
demise by sexual degeneracy. Racism is invariably a sign of sexual
decadence and demographic decline. In both Grant and Dershowitz,
what claims to be concern over the survival of a favored ethnic
group is in reality the ruling class lamenting its coming loss
of power because of its failure to reproduce. Instead of confronting
the source of this problem in sexual degeneracy, demagogues like
Grant and Dershowitz and Malcolm X rely on appeals to racial
fantasies because they know that telling the truth would make
them unpopular. Alan Dershowitz applies the same sort of demonization
to the Christian right that Grant applied to the Russian Jews
who were Dershowitzs forbears for precisely the same reason.
They cant face the fact that "demography is destiny"
and that their coming loss of political power is based on their
own degenerate sexual practices.

Sam Shapiro and his wife bought into the same deal, although
he did not recognize it as such when it was made. At that point,
all he knew was that his second wife wanted to become a professor
and that that would be hard to do while raising a large family.
Although they didnt see it at the time, the price which
was exacted for assimilation was lasting political power, and
that is so because offspring are the basis of political power.
Assimilation means that the Jew wins over the short term, but
loses over the long term because he sacrifices his children for
success. Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Sam Dresner have little in
common politically, but both are Jews and both are aware of the
deal that Jews have cut to be accepted. If you contracept well
let you into our club. If you contracept well give you
a Jaguar. The Jews took the Jaguar instead of the child. Sam
Shapiro has two children, ages 37 and 39 and no grandchildren,
nor does it seem likely that he will have any.

Father Hesburgh tried to do the same deal for Catholics by
taking Rockefellers money and working to change the teaching
of the Catholic Church on contraception. For his pains, he was
recently given the Congressional Medal of Honor, but he didnt
succeed, as evidenced by the fact that there are 60 million Catholics
in the United States and 1 billion worldwide. But what proved
to be a disaster politically for the Catholics turned out to
be a disaster demographically for the Jews. They were not numerous
to begin with. Now their numbers are decreasing dramatically
as part of the deal they cut with the WASP establishment. Which
may explain their resentment against the Republican Party and
the WASP establishment as evidenced by the recent McCain candidacy.

In spite of his name, John McCain was the Jewish candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination. Marvin Olasky, himself
a Jew (although not the kind Dershowitz would accept) was attacked
as an anti-Semite when he defended George Bush in a by now famous
article in the February 16 issue of the Austin American-Statesman
against what he called "the Party of Zeus," an oblique
reference to the anti-Christian bias of the neocon Jews who were
backing McCain. "Jewish neoconservatives," Franklin
Froer announced in the New Republic in an article that defended
him in much the same way that the Atlantic defended Dan Quayle
in his fight with Murphy Brown, "have fallen hard for John
McCain. . . . McCain has also won over such leading neocon lights
as David Brooks, the entire Podhoretz family, the Wall Street
Journals Dorothy Rabinowitz and columnist Charles Krauthammer
, who declared in a most un-Semitic flourish, He suffered
for our sins."

The McCain candidacy took off when George Bush, the WASP candidate,
announced that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ. Once
Bush mentioned Jesus Christ, the media began its attack in earnest.
What looked like bi-partisan disapprovalFrank Rich was
a liberal and Bill Kristol was a conservative, after allturned
out to be upon closer inspection Jewish disapproval. Jews did
not like to hear presidential candidates mention Jesus Christ.
Jews do not like George Bush. McCain had been primed to respond
to this challenge to secular hegemony over public utterance by
his adviser, Marshall Wittmann, another Jewish neocon who had
worked with Bill Kristol, giving McCain articles from the neocon
Weekly Standard which advocated Kristol and David Brooks
theory that Republicans should return to the domestic activism
and foreign interventionism of Theodore Roosevelt. McCains
candidacy went down in flames when he flew to Virginia and attacked
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as a way of stealing the Republican
Party from the religious right. In this bit of overreaching we
see once again an indication of Jewish pique against their WASP
masters in the post-modern generation. They assimilated to get
power, but they got power at the expense of offspring and so
now that power is going to be taken away from them. The recklessness
of the McCain campaign bespeaks just this sense of weve-got-nothing-to-lose
recklessness in a group which stands currently at the pinnacle
of its political power but knows it is going to lose that power
over the long haul and decides, as a result, to go for broke
in the short run.

The recklessness of the McCain campaign bespoke, when all
was said and done, Jewish anger at the Republican Party, which
had become a surrogate for the WASP establishment. After following
Digby Baltzells advice, the WASPs were now being attacked
by the very people they so magnanimously let into their club.
The McCain candidacy showed deep-seated Jewish anger at the WASP
establishment, of the sort that Digby Baltzell would say was
tantamount to biting the hand that feeds it, but Baltzell had
already predicted what was going to happen: "The polished
graduate of Harvard in the third generation," he wrote,
"will surely not be content. . . either to remain within
the confines of his ethnico-religous community or to remain forever
a marginal man" (Baltzell, Establishment, p. 75). Baltzell
could have been describing here the difference between Irving
Kristol, who wrote in National Review that Jews will always be
a minority in this country and should behave accordingly, and
his son Bill, the man who just about single-handedly orchestrated
the McCain attack on the WASP establishment in the Republican
Party. The Jews, as Dershowitz makes clear, exterminated their
own ethnos with contraception and abortion, and now they realize
too late that they are passing from the political scene. The
power they sought so avidly is not theirs to wield, and what
they have is going to be taken away from them . The same rule
that applied to the WASPs applies to them: No progeny, no power.
Just as the WASP aristocracy had to admit Jews to maintain the
empire, so now Jews will have to admit the goyim to maintain
an empire their unborn children cannot inherit because they were
never born. This is, needless to say, painful to admit. It will
always be easier for demagogues to follow the path of least resistance
for short term gain, and so instead of uttering their own mea
culpa for promoting sexual revolution, the Jews lash out at their
imagined enemies. Hence, McCains attack on the religious
right and the publishing industrys attack on Pius XII.

This phenomenon is nowhere more apparent than in the area
of foreign policy. Jews in America never had the demographic
clout to elect their own legislatures. But foreign policy is
not decided by popular election. For years the WASP establishment
ran the state department by drawing its members from Yale in
general and secret societies like the Skull and Bones in particular.
George Bush senior was a member of Skull and Bones, and George
Bush preserved the old WASP hegemony over the state department
and foreign policy. As a result, the Jews did not like George
Bush and worked for his defeat. That animus has carried over
into their dislike of his son. Hence, the McCain candidacy.

The prohibition against Jews in higher levels at the State
Department was removed when Bill Clinton became president. We
know this because Alan Dershowitz says so in his book. "Bill
Clintons presidency," he writes, "marked the
end of discrimination against Jews in the upper echelons of government.
For the first time in American history, the fact that an aspirant
for high appointive office was a Jew became irrelevant in his
or her selection" (Dershowitz, p. 9). Before long, again
according to Dershowitz, "all the officials in Clintons
administration at that time who had power over the economythe
Secretaries of the Treasury, Commerce, Labor and Agriculture,
as well as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board were
Jews." Dershowitz left out the secretaries of state and
defense, but, as if to calm the fears of the anti-Semites, goes
on to add that "as Jews these individuals will no be serving
any particular religious or ethnic agenda" (Dershowitz,
p. 59).

Dershowitz concludes his book by calling for a world-wide
congress of Jews, modeled on the one Theodore Herzl convoked
in Zurich one hundred years ago. Dershowitzs conference,
however, will not be held in Zurich because "Switzerland
has disqualified itself [as place for the conference] by its
disgraceful role during the Holocaust and its current attempt
at covering it up" (Dershowitz, p. 340). By mentioning Switzerland,
Dershowitz exposes the disingenuous nature of his claim that
the Jews in government "will not be serving any particular
religious or ethnic agenda," for the attack on Switzerland
over the Nazi-Gold incident and the subsequent attack over immigration
was nothing but a government-sponsored looting expedition conducted
for the benefit of Jewish organizations. The extortion of billions
of dollars from the Swiss could not have taken place without
close government support. Senator Alphonse DAmato of New
York worked closely with both the World Jewish Congress and Stuart
Eisenstadt of the State Department, who in turn worked with Ambassador
Madeleine Kunin. This sort of thing did not happen when Faith
Whittlesley was ambassador to Switzerland.

As Norman Finklestein, author of The Holocaust Industry: The
Abuse of Jewish Victims, makes clear, "The holocaust industry
first tried out its strategy in Switzerland. It began with putting
Senator Alphonse DAmato and the United States government
on their case. Then came the lawyers with their demands for reparations.
The third prong of the attack began with setting bank regulators
like Alan Hevesi in action. All of this was accompanied by the
hysteria in the media. It took three years to bring Switzerland
to its knees" (Zeitfragen, 3/20/00, p. 8).

Now the Jewish organizations, which keep 45 percent of the
financial booty they acquire in these looting expeditions, have
targeted Austria. Holocaust Lawyer Ed Fagan showed up in Austria
in February demanding the "return" of $10 billion in
property and artwork, even though these cases had all been settled
in 1953. The net result of these government sponsored looting
campaigns for the Jewish organizations which make up what Finklestein
calls the "Holocaust Industry" is precisely what they
claim they want to combat, namely, anti-Semitism. "Instead
of letting the dead rest in peace," Finklestein said, "the
Holocaust Industry foments anti-Semitism, wherever it puts its
foot down in Europe."

In the imperialistic war in Kosovo, we see the lethal side
of allowing one group to run the countrys foreign policy
for its own benefit. From Bolshevism to the Wolfowitz memorandum,
we can see one constant, namely, Jewish animus against Russia.
That animus is now running our foreign policy, and it has ruined
the window of opportunity for world peace that existed in the
early 1990s. The Russians are now convinced that the United States
is out to destroy it. The Swiss and the Austrians are convinced
of something similar primarily as the result of plundering which
Jewish organizations were allowed to do there. The Serbians felt
the same wrath. No group covered itself with more shame in the
Kosovo war than the neocon imperialists, people like Thomas Friedman
at the New York Times calling for the destruction of Belgrade
or the lady at the New Republic who wrote the article on "Milosevics
Willing Executioners," taking her title from the bogus tome
of Daniel Goldhagen of Harvard.

All of this is the inexorable consequence of empire. As the
disintegration of the Republican party into its ethnic components
has made clear, empire is divisive. It pits one group against
another in an unending struggle for power. In this regard, the
Enlightenment has proved to be its own undoing. The United States,
by turning into an empire, has disintegrated into the ethnic
components it sought to repress. If anyone is interested in putting
Humpty-Dumpty back together again, he will have to consult the
instruction manual, namely, the caveats of people like John Adams
who warned that the Constitution would only function if the populace
internalized the principle of civil order implicit in the moral
law.

Alan Dershowitz attacks Rabbi Daniel Lapin and the Jewish
columnist Don Feder for taking part in the Christian Coalitions
"Road to Victory" conference in 1995, but he can never
really explain why they would consort so avidly with what Dershowitz
considers their enemies. The answer is something which transcends
Dershowitzs view of ethnic politics. The answer is moral
revulsion. Jews like Feder, Lapin and Dresner are upset at the
moral decay that people like Dershowitz, who defended President
Clintons illicit sexual relationship with a Jewish intern,
have brought about. They are especially upset as Jews because
as Jews they can never be more than a tiny minority in a vast
ocean of what is now becoming a pagan culture. They are upset
because a pagan culture is a violent culture. As the rise of
the Nazis in Germany showed, de-Christianization can have unpleasant
consequences, even for the most rabid de-Christianizer. "With
the enfeeblement of Christianity," Dresner writes, "that
world has become pagan root and branch." Those who enfeeble
Christianity, whether by sins of commission or omission, would
do well to ponder the alternative.

The alternative to the alternative, however, is still what
it has always been. "We have no constitution that functions
in the absence of a moral people," John Adams wrote. The
Clinton presidency has proved that fact beyond a doubt. No matter
how it looks now, steeped in the blood of empire, America is
a country which worked once when it was a republic whose unwritten
constitution was the moral law. The only way it is going to work
again is the way it worked then, which is to say, in Rabbi Dresners
words, as "a new coalition, a union of Jews and Gentiles
with a common commitment to civilization and a common abhorrence
of social and moral chaos" (p. 51).